Obama’s Re-Election Path May Be Written in Will St. Clair’s Code

Obama’s chief political strategist David Axelrod said, “There’s a lot you can do in the way of more finely targeting voters so they’re getting information that’s useful to them.” Photographer: Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg

Dec. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Will St. Clair, wearing semi-rimless
glasses, a plaid buttoned-down shirt, jeans and Adidas sneakers,
can usually be found sitting on an exercise ball in the back of
President Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters, his eyes trained
on his computer screen.

The 23-year-old’s job is a mystery even to some senior
staff in Chicago, yet they say they hope the skills he brings
are a secret weapon: he’s a software engineer.

St. Clair is among more than a dozen developers hired by
the campaign to leverage technology to wring out more votes in
what Obama’s advisers say may be an election as close as the
contested 2000 race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. From
Seattle startups to International Business Machines Corp.,
they’ve left lucrative jobs to mine for swing voters. They've
added a new term to the strategic lexicon: microlistening.

“Right now, if you want to call this the ‘data arms race,’
clearly Democrats are ahead,” said Alex Gage, CEO of
TargetPoint Consulting, who worked on voter targeting for Bush’s
successful re-election effort in 2004.

The Obama campaign is guarding the details of the operation
like the political equivalent of nuclear secrets: “I’ll be
happy to discuss what we’re doing after we do it,” said David
Axelrod, Obama’s chief political strategist.

“The things we did in 2008 in many ways were prehistoric
by contemporary standards,” Axelrod said at a Dec. 7 Bloomberg
View lunch. “There’s a lot you can do in the way of more finely
targeting voters so they’re getting information that’s useful to
them.”

Micro Campaign

St. Clair and his team are creating tools to connect with
people properly. For example, disenchanted voters are wooed, not
hit up for money. They call it microlistening.

Other hints can be gleaned from an Obama campaign job
posting that Gage, now consulting for Republican presidential
candidate Mitt Romney, took note of last spring recruiting
“quantitative analysts.”

“The Obama for America analytics department analyzes the
campaign’s data to guide election strategy and develop
quantitative, actionable insights that drive our decision-making,” it says. “We are a multidisciplinary team of
statisticians, mathematicians, software developers, general
analysts and organizers -- all striving for a single goal: re-electing President Obama.”

The Obama team is taking technology development in-house.

“In 2008 we were very adept users of technology,” said
Michael Slaby, the campaign’s chief integration and innovation
officer. “We are much more ambitious about what we’re capable
of building on our own.”

Political Hurdles

To be sure, no amount of technological sophistication may
be enough for Obama to overcome stubbornly high unemployment,
which his administration forecasts will be above 8 percent next
year. Since World War II, no U.S. president has won re-election
with a jobless rate above 6 percent, with the exception of
Ronald Reagan, who faced 7.2 percent unemployment on Election
Day in 1984.

Obama’s opponents also are seeking new ways to employ
technology and build on the voter targeting effort in Bush’s
2004 re-election.

“Republicans realize they have to catch up, and I’m
reasonably confident they will,” Gage said. “Will they surpass
them? No.”

While it’s the first foray into campaigning for many of
Obama’s quantitative analysts, the experience of trying to
outmaneuver rivals like Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. may be
ideal for the world of innovative political warfare.

“We have all these engineers here, who were part of start-ups and almost all of them competed against some giant
behemoth,” said Harper Reed, the campaign’s chief technology
officer, who recruited based on who he’d want for any start-up.

Business Model

Reed was formerly CTO of Threadless, a Chicago-based T-shirt company whose business model relies on crowdsourcing to
design and sell its products. The privately held company lets
artists submit designs for a public vote. Reed said the
company’s revenue increased 10-fold from when he started with
Threadless in 2005 to when he left in 2009.

Unshaven, with black plastic-rimmed glasses and stretched
earlobes adorned with metal hoop earrings, Reed, 33, is
emblematic of a hipster style coexisting with the traditional.
Staffers joke that facial hair is required in the dimly-lit back
section of the office reserved for Slaby’s team.

Artist’s Brush

Like artists who only paint with certain brushes, many of
the engineers brought their own keyboards. Reed’s is black and
has no labels -- he likes the noise it makes and the bounce to
the fingers. Rather than chairs, many sit on large exercise
balls. Or they don’t sit at all, electing instead to prop their
computers on cardboard boxes and work standing up.

“There was a weird sense when you came in here that you
were changing the campaign just by coexisting in the same spaces
as everyone else,” said Anders Conbere, 28, an engineer who
brought his own keyboard when he moved from Seattle.

Reed convinced Conbere to leave his job as a software
developer for Estately Inc., a real estate index described on
its website as a “Seattle-based team of geeks taking on the $50
billion real estate industry.” Earlier in his career, Conbere
worked at aQuantive, an Internet advertising firm, when it was
purchased by Microsoft Corp. for $6 billion in 2007 -- the
biggest acquisition for the company until it bought Skype
Technologies SA earlier this year.

To make every vote count in this difficult election
climate, there’s little room for error, and the right staff is
critical, according to Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly
Media, a computer book publisher.

Deliberate Magic

“They got lucky the first time,” O’Reilly, who advised
the campaign earlier this year, said. “They had a bunch of
idealistic volunteers who came out of nowhere to help them.
They’re trying to do deliberately what happened by magic last
time.”

O’Reilly coined the term microlistening when he met with
campaign officials and heard what they were trying to do. They
are parsing constituent concerns in fine detail. It’s easy to
generate a lot of data and miss the point so, if done right, the
work is more valuable than any poll, strategists say.

It comes down to data -- collecting voter information,
synthesizing it and making use of it most effectively. The data
comes from conversations on the ground and behavioral patterns
on the website. Analysts may try to determine how to best target
a voter who gives $5 to participate in a raffle to have dinner
with the president versus $5 during a Republican debate.

Approach to Voters

If a supporter tells the campaign that a neighbor who voted
for Obama in 2008, lost his job, is frustrated with the
president’s handling of the economy and is now undecided, the
most important distillation of that information may be that
sending someone out to ask for a donation could cost Obama that
vote.

“There are always going to be enough people out there to
vote for Barack Obama,” said Clay Johnson, founder of Blue
State Digital Media LLC, which managed Obama’s online campaign
in 2008.

“The question is whether they can be persuaded, organized
and activated enough to get to the polls and technology is going
to be the thing that does that,” said Johnson, author of “The
Information Diet.”

Beyond targeting, they’re finding ways to boost efficiency
at all levels of the organization -- even the online store.

Quick Analysis

Last month, one group of engineers noticed that people
trying to buy products like Obama T-shirts using mobile devices
weren’t completing their purchases. Others on the team quickly
realized that the site, a key fundraising tool, wasn’t user
friendly for smart-phones. Within a week, another group of
engineers changed the interface and sales went up that day.

“We never would have figured it out” during the last
campaign, Slaby said. “We didn’t have enough skill in any of
these three places to put data in a place that could be
intelligently analyzed and acted on quickly.”

Slaby and Reed hope to keep expanding, recruiting engineers
largely by word of mouth. It’s how Anders decided to move to
Chicago only weeks after purchasing a home in Seattle.

Over coffee last spring, Reed told Slaby he’d join the
campaign and immediately wanted to lock in their next hire.

Anders was 2,100 miles away, driving home from work with
his wife when he received a 2-word text message from Reed: